After a purchase (sales form) how do you have the system automatically email a receipt/invoice for their purchase?

I have scoured help, and tried to see if there is an action that can be applied, and I'm missing it... Also, how does it work on the e-commerce side?

Ideas?

The best way to send a receipt with a sale form is to run an action that will either send an email, or put the customer into a campaign. The email would contain information pertaining to the order. If it is a product that is physically shipped out,and you wish to provide tracking info,unfortunately at this time we do not offer integration with UPS or USPS, that is coming in the future. You would then have to create an email for each sale form.

With the Shopping cart, there is an actual receipt that goes out upon purchase. You would access the settings on this receipt by going to Ecommerce>>Order Receipt Settings. When you get there, you can customize the receipt and include order details.

We are redoing our knowledge base, and I will make sure there is an article or information pertaining to the Order Receipt Settings.

Marianne

Ok, so on the sales form, it sounds like you can certainly sent them an email, but if they want the official invoice that Infusion creates, it is a manual operation. There appears to be no merge fields available for the most recent order...

I guess you could have an action sequence that would populate custom fields with purchase data, and then send the email with the field data merged, but this would be difficult if there are coupon codes, etc...

Not "automated" but lastly could let them know in the email to look for a receipt in the next 24 hours, and then an admin can send them manually...

Other ideas?

I really think Infusionsoft needs to be able to generate these order receipts and have them emailed to the customer when an order is placed via a sales form!
I mean think about it... you have this great software that does all these great things and you can't send out a simple Order Receipt to a customer when they place an order online?!!! That's absurd!
And what's even more absurd is that you're asking us to do a dance and create a quasi invoice by adding them to campaigns or sending them out manually?!!
Hey Infusionsoft - here's a suggestion - fix the system so that it send out an order receipt when a customer places an order through the sales form.
We pay good money to use this software that's supposed to be automated - not so we can do more work. Fix the system please!

Karim,

I agree, there should be a more robust e-mail invoicing system; however, our software isn't designed for that. Our software's main focus is on automated followup technology, e-mail campaigns and contact management. Definitely, almost any shopping cart offers e-mail based receipts, as they should.

Workarounds aren't necessary dances as you put it; they are workarounds until a feature comes to life. It's possible to create an e-mail template and have it confirm their purchase for a sales form, and include various Merge Fields. The e-mail would be sent automatically, ideally.

I believe the reference to sending invoices/receipts manually was if a customer was in-person or on the phone with you.

Offering a sales-form receipt is a great idea. I'm not sure when we can slot it in, but I'll forward this suggestion to product management for consideration.

Thanks again for the suggestion and the context in how this would better empower small business owners, like yourself.

~Joe

Just to be clear, Infusionsoft WILL generate order receipts from the shopping cart. If you really need order receipts to go out, use the shopping cart.

I understand that some businesses would rather use a sale form. In that case, use the API.

When you set up the "Actions (Success)" on your sale form, create an action that sends "an http post to another server". Post the contact ID to a page on your site. On that page, use the API to pull the most recent invoice information and email it to the customer.

Yes, its a hack. Yes, this should and will be included in the product. But for now, that's a pretty decent solution.

Hope that helps.

Admin,
Thanks for the suggestion but frankly I haven't the time to do all that and I still can't understand why this wasn't done originally - it seems like a basic requirement. Hopefully you'll get it fixed soon.

Hi Joe,
Yes workarounds are helpful but I would think sending an invoice to a customer is an essential requirement and fairly basic - can't understand why it was never done to begin with.

I appreciate the response and there are other issues with the sales form.
We've made the country a required field on the billing information.
But sometimes a customer fills out the billing and then starts the shipping information but they don't complete it.
When that happens the fulfillment report picks up the information entered in the shipping information section - but since this is only partially filled we only get part of the information on the fulfillment report. The report is doing what it should.

We then have to go back into the record and find the information from the billing section.

Is there a way to resolve this? I'm not sure.

Also on the shopping cart orders we're finding that when customers place an order, go to select their shipping information, hit the back button to check something, then continue on the cart loses the order information. We get an invoice with 0 dollars in it and no product listed.
I did speak with support and they said this is a known issue - any word on if this can be resolved?

Indeed, having an invoice mailed to the customer who makes a purchase seems pretty simple...and I have confidence Infusion will address this...hopefully soon.

Thanks for supplying ideas on the workaround....I suppose I need to read up on using the API.

I agree with the feedback here. I've forwarded this concerns to the product management to hold under consideration for a future release.

With Infusionsoft, it does take a little time (figure a couple days) of strategic planning to incorporate the automation mechanics (like receipts, for example); then it's a fully automated, fine-tuned small business machine.

I believe that one of our product managers is working towards offering included templates, copy, and action sequences to help entrepreneurs dive into marketing automation even quicker.

Thanks again for all the feedback!

~Joe